Showing posts with label Modernity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Modernity. Show all posts

Tuesday, 2 September 2025

Anachronistic Grisaille/Space and Architecture : Cyanotype/Diaphanous And Indexical Negatives

Research as a discursive activity gathering new forms of expression.

Duration, Steven Holl
Time is only understood in relation to a process or a phenomenon.

The duration of human beings alive in one time and place is a relational notion.
The time of one's being is provisional; it is a circumstance with an adopted aim for the time being.

SPACE-and ARCHITECTURE-exceeds the provisional

Concrete/Abstract Painting : Areas of Grisaille. Outpost Studios, Norwich.





















We are not in the presence of a passively representative image, but a vector of subjectivation.
Guattari, 1995 :25

Cyanotype is a photographic printing process that produces a cyan-blue print. Engineers used the process well into the 20th century as a simple and low-cost process to produce copies of drawings, referred to as blueprints. The process uses two chemicals: ammonium iron(III) citrate and potassium ferricyanide.

The English scientist and astronomer Sir John Herschel discovered the procedure in 1842.[1] Though the process was developed by Herschel, he considered it as mainly a means of reproducing notes and diagrams, as in blueprints.[2] It was Anna Atkins who brought this to photography. She created a limited series of cyanotype books that documented ferns and other plant life from her extensive seaweed collection.[3] Atkins placed specimens directly onto coated paper, allowing the action of light to create a silhouette effect. By using this photogram process, Anna Atkins is regarded as the first female photographer.[4]

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Blue Spaces Of Everyday Enchantments : White Absences #2. Silence/Void : Gap/Reveal





















The Enchantment of Modern Life.
Attachments, Crossing and Ethics

The performativity of social representations

When I gather together the animals, arguments, molecules, suggestions, forces, interpretations, sounds, people, and images of this study, one theme emerges. The modern story of disenchantment leaves out important things, and it neglects crucial sources of ethical generosity in doing so. Without modes of enchantment, we might not have the energy and inspiration to enact ecological projects, or to contest ugly and unjust modes of commercialization, or to respond generously to humans and nonhumans that challenge our settled identities. These enchantments are already in and around us.

Jane Bennett





Tracing Light : Petworth House, West Sussex 2000
David Alan Mellor, Garry Fabian Miller.

Light And The Genius Loci
For Derrida, the sun not only marks the beginning of metaphoricity but it is also an inescapable reminder of the solar system and oscillations, hidings and occultrations, inherent in 'a certain history of the relationships; earth/sun in the system of perception'.

Mutations Of Light
Petworth Window, 6 July 1999

Light's Windows And Rooms
Passing towards the Invisible.
The prospect of some metaphysical realm beyond the blue end of the spectrum and beyond material things illuminated to carnal sight, was a recurrent  theme in William Henry Fox Talbot's early speculations.



BROUGHT TO LIGHT
PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE INVISIBLE 1840-1900




















Sight Unseen
Picturing The Universe
Corey Keller
Invisible objects, penciled by nature's own hand.
In his introduction to the exhibition catalogue Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art, the historian of science Bruno Latour argues that scientific pictures are powerfully affective because they more than mere images; they are, as he puts it, the 'world itself'.

The Social
Photographic Eye
Jennifer Tucker
Nineteenth century science was characterized by both the appeal to visual evidence and the need for confirmation by the testimony of eyewitnesses. The latter explains why scientists pursued public viewings of their photographs by means of illustrated slide lectures, exhibitions, and reproduction in newspapers and magazines.
An understanding of the social boundaries of nineteenth century science helps make sense of a certain paradox within contemporary attitudes towards photography of the invisible. The ideal of mechanical objectivity in documenting visual knowledge demanded the elimination of the artist-observer and all of the subjectivity implicit in drawing by hand.

Invisible Worlds
Visible Media
Tom Gunning
William Henry Fox Talbot, Slice of horse chestnut, seen through the solar microscope, 1840, salt print 18.6x22.5 cm.

Techniques Of The Observer
On Vision And Modernity In The Nineteenth Century
Jonathan Crary

The Camera Obscura and its Subject
Above all it indicates the appearance of a new model of subjectivity, the hegemony of a new subject-effect. First of all the camera obscura performs an operation of individuation; that is, it necessarily defines an observer as isolated, enclosed, and autonomous within its dark confines. It impels a kind of askesis, or withdrawal from the world, in order to regulate and purify one's relation to the manifold contents of the now 'exterior' world.

UNDER THE SUN
By The Light Of The Fertile Observer

Metaphors of illumination in the photography of Christopher Bucklow, Susan Derges, Garry Fabian Miller, and Adam Fuss.

An Epiphany Of Light
David Alan Mellor




Friday, 27 June 2025

Thresholds of The Body Image/Body Boundary

Outpost 291223


Drawing/Dwelling.

Thresholds of The Body Image/Body Boundary.










Drawings and their haptic experiences which include the entire body give fundamental meanings to visual experiences. The extra-personal space of drawing, haptically and psychically touching the space occupied with others. The body is the source of a 'personal world' which generates many of the meanings by which we experience the whole world. When we consciously stare at an object, the body boundary 'hardens' and there is a heightened sense of separation, whereas a casual viewing weakens the sense of separation and encourages instead a psychic fusion with the object.


Seated Woman with bent knee.

Her haptic experiences of space, the push and pull of gravity on her sense 'inside' of a centred body.

The Artist's Wife.

Egon Schiele. 1917



Readings beyond the success and failure of Life Drawing.

Art/Effrontery-Affect/Attraction/The Abject 


Drawing/Feeling through the framework of the body


Bachelard, on images, of pulling away from framing concepts.


The Drawing/Physical Self, with others in the  life class/in solitude in the studio.


Drawings/Graphic Correspondences, represent time spent searching the figure, finding its form.

Drawings present ways of/responses to seeing feelings.


Working From Corporeality.

Skin/Sensuality/Tensioned/Compressed Flesh.


The Situation/Observation and Criteria of Drawing from The Body.

Drawing on the hapticity of the living/sensing body.


Drawing from/present with the Body of Others.

Drawing from/working from the Images of Others.


Departures/Innovations/Differences from 'institutional drawing' situations and their outcomes.


The Figure/Human Form scrutinized/represented via the framing nature/device of the picture frame and its sensing gathering surface.


Painting/Drawings, mark making through abstraction and figuration.

Drawing intimacy/closeness with the drawn images, sensing self from their physical presence.



Life Drawing Re-Imagined.

Drawing from the Human Form.


The Nude in Art.

The Naked Human Form in Contemporary Art.



Drawing Bodily Transactions.

Private and Social Properties.


Egon Schiele.

Eros and Passion.

Klaus Albrecht Schroder.


In Schiele, the artist is always there, similarly in the drawings the exaggerated perspective, the striking angle of sight which situates every viewer of a Schiele drawing in a specific location of observation which defines the active relationship between artist and model. Schiele makes the process of observation his theme by giving thematic status to the observer.


Schiele's nudes are unsanctioned by any artistic genre, in his art  aesthetics disowns itself and art disowns its tradition.


Squatting Couple. 1918

Egon Schiele.

This painting appeared in the 1918 Secession catalogue as Squatting Couple, but after the death of Schiele and his wife it was retitled The Family.


Body-Fragmented-Modernity.

The Body of the individual in terms of isolation and alienation.

Fractured figures, bodies made from parts/areas of bounded/blemished flesh.


Schiele's fractured 'figure types' make visible the conflict, archetypal of its period between the whole and its parts. The points, areas of fracture, the angularities of their crooked members show each part independent of the others.


Drawings made of parts, areas constructed by components resulting in bodies being isolated from a somatic whole. Balanced though Schiele's compositions are in physical terms via his sureness of hand, the figures themselves have no core, the mobility of their limbs does not derive from any psycho-physical centre.



Looking Into Other Criteria.

Drawings Unpacking 1997-2017.

Expressive Content/The Body Exposed.


Selected From Living Bodies.


Selected From Other Images.